Memorial Hall is an imposing brick building in High Victorian Gothic
style, located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. It is now a National Historic Landmark.

Memorial Hall was erected in honor of Harvard graduates who
fought for the Union in the American Civil War. From 1865 to 1868, a
fund-raising committee gathered $370,000, then equal to one-twelfth of
Harvard's total endowment, which was augmented by an additional $40,000
bequest from Charles Sanders, class of 1802 and college steward
1827-1831, for "a hall or theatre to be used on Commencement days, Class
days, Exhibition days, days of the meetings of the society of Alumni, or
any other public occasion connected with the College, whether literary
or festive."

An architectural competition began in December 1865, with the
winning designs submitted by William Robert Ware, class of 1852, and
Henry Van Brunt, class of 1854. (These initial designs were altered as
plans proceeded.) In 1870 the building was named Memorial Hall and its
cornerstone laid; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., composed a hymn for the
occasion. The hall was dedicated for use in 1874, with Sanders Theatre
substantially complete in 1875, and the tower completed in 1877. The
tower was subsequently destroyed in a 1956 fire but rebuilt in 1999.

In The Bostonians, Henry James described it thus: "The Memorial
Hall of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theater,
for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a
timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows,
like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most
interesting, a chamber high, dim and severe, consecrated to the sons of
the university who fell in the long Civil War." Principal interior
features of Memorial Hall are as follows:

Sanders Theatre is a handsome lecture and concert hall of 1,166
seats, wood-paneled with statues of James Otis (by Thomas Crawford) and
Josiah Quincy (by William Wetmore Story), and inspired by Christopher
Wren's Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, England. It contains John La
Farge's stained glass window Athena Tying a Mourning Fillet.
The hall's great room (9,000 square feet), now known as Annenberg
Hall, is a lofty and impressive space shaped by massive wooden trusses,
walnut paneling, and a blue, stenciled ceiling. It was converted to a
student commons soon after construction, and served as the college's
main dining hall until 1926. From 1926 until 1994, it was only lightly
used but after extensive renovation reopened in 1996 as the Freshman
Student Center. The Memorial Transept (2,600 square foot) consists of a 60-foot
high gothic vault above a marble floor, black walnut paneling and
stenciled walls, two stained glass windows, and 28 white marble tablets
commemorating 136 Civil War casualties. Twenty-two stained glass windows throughout the building,
installed between 1879 and 1902, include works by John La Farge (4
windows), Louis Comfort Tiffany Studios (3 windows), and Sarah Wyman
Whitman (2 windows).

Special thanks to the Society of Architectural Historians
for some of the images on this page (copyright SAH).